CIRSD Recommends

Almost two years ago, I alerted readers to a contest, sponsored by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation through the Global Development Network, to develop new ideas to improve the impact of development cooperation. The Next Horizons Essay contest 2014 received 1,470 submissions from 142 countries, from which 13 winners were selected.

Issuing work permits to refugees in return for donor support for jobs is seen as a “win-win-win” for refugees, host countries, and the international community. It would stem the flow of refugees to Europe, decrease the dangers of radicalization, and prevent the exploitation of refugees as a source of cheap labor.

The Chinese government has outlined a plan to reduce its citizens’ meat consumption by 50%, in a move that climate campaigners hope will provide major heft in the effort to avoid runaway global warming.

The 7th annual Global Entrepreneurship Summit (GES), set to open this week in Silicon Valley, has attracted over 1,000 conferees out of 4,500 applicants from around the world. It will be hosted by President Barack Obama who, starting with the inaugural summit in 2009, has made entrepreneurship promotion an element of his foreign policy.

Two years ago, the armies of the group that would soon call itself the Islamic State, a group that already controlled large swathes of territory in Iraq and Syria, entered Mosul, the second city of Iraq. The Iraqi Army, in which the United States had invested, or perhaps wasted, US$25 billion, fled in fear.

The UN General Assembly committed to “eliminate poverty in all its forms everywhere” by 2030, when it met in New York last year. The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) were launched with much fanfare, endorsed by heads-of-state, celebrities and CEOs.

When we think of green buildings, we often picture towering office buildings with green walls and state-of-the-art technologies – such as the iconic Empire State Building retrofit or the EDGE office building in Amsterdam – with shiny LEED or BREEAM plaques at reception, boasting of their environmental credentials.

For a frontrunner for the post of the world's top diplomat, Vuk Jeremić is rather candid about how he thinks the United Nations should change. "If you look at the UN's speeches and compare it to an average Ted Talk, there's quite a difference. I would like more Ted Talk and less UN diplomatic niceties," he told IBTimes UK.

On June 23, 2016, British voters will decide whether they want to leave the European Union, a possibility widely referred to as "Brexit." Polls indicate that the result of the referendum is wide open, with the Remain camp and the Leave camp neck­and­neck in recent public opinion polls.

AFTER a terrorist attack like the one in Florida on Sunday, one of the first questions people always ask is: Why? Why would someone take the lives of innocent civilians who are total strangers? That is a question to which I have long sought an answer. But my search has led me instead to another question: Is an answer even possible?

In March alone, at least nine cities across three continents were hit by terrorist attacks. Municipalities—from megacities to tertiary cities—continue to bear the brunt of such attacks: in the short term, they provide first response and take essential security measures; in the longer term, they suffer from the fallout of intercommunal tensions and economic slowdowns, which can last for years and spread beyond the target city.

The world has made so much progress in reducing the spread of AIDS and treating people with H.I.V. that the epidemic has receded from the public spotlight. Yet by any measure the disease remains a major threat — 1.1 million people died last year from AIDS-related causes, and 2.1 million people were infected with the virus.

International development aid is based on the Robin Hood principle: take from the rich and give to the poor. National development agencies, multilateral organizations, and NGOs currently transfer more than $135 billion a year from rich countries to poor countries with this idea in mind.

In a recent major survey undertaken by the Campaign for Female Education (Camfed) in Tanzania and Zimbabwe, low academic self-esteem was the second most frequently expressed reason for dropping out of school among marginalized girls, after poverty-related issues.

Human smugglers increasingly combine smuggling with exploitation and their victims are often children,” says Federica Toscano. “At chaotic border situations, it happens that smugglers deliberately separate refugee children from their parents to exploit them.’’

One of the most exciting areas of advanced manufacturing is 3-D printing. While it has been around for many years to produce crude prototypes, 3-D printing is now being used to make everything from jet engines and complex machine parts to bridges and buildings, artificial limbs and biomedical tissue.

While no one advocates for labor abuses, poor working conditions are often seen as an inevitable consequence of global trade. Producers in less-developed countries compete by keeping costs low. Conventional wisdom holds that improving working conditions (which typically costs money) would undermine the competitive advantage these firms enjoy.

Narrowing the global gender gap would have huge potential economic benefits. According to the McKinsey Global Institute (MGI), if every government helped its citizens catch up to the country in its region that has made the fastest strides toward gender parity, the total annual payoff in additional GDP could reach $12 trillion in 2025.

Over the past decade, the number of undernourished people around the world has declined by around 167 million, to just under 800 million people. However, this positive trend glosses over a stark reality: Food insecurity is increasing in the world’s mountains. This pattern has been under-recognized by development experts and governments, a dangerous oversight with far-reaching social and environmental repercussions.

Europe’s Mediterranean neighbourhood has become a focal point of attention due to the refugee crisis. With over a million people arriving in Europe in the course of 2015, the question of how to address the growing immigration pressures has become a central political issue.

2015 was a historic year for international commitments to sustainable development, climate change action, and new kinds of peacebuilding. For governments and policymakers, now comes the difficult task of living up to those commitments.